MBoffin.com

Something witty this way comes.

Blogger Unmasked!

While trying to figure out last night's little fiasco, I ran across a few search results that got me wondering.

Way back about the time when banner ads were still effective advertising (yes, that long ago), Mr. Dupree called me into his office to show me this kick-ass killer app for personal web sites called Blogger from some heretofor unknown company called Pyra. Needless to say, I was impressed. I had just started learning ASP about that time, and had just finished the first news administration tool ever for this site. Having just finished that, I was able to appreciate the amount of work it took to create a tool like Blogger, which was basically my news administration tool on a massive scale.

Dupree and I got to discussing how they did it and were poking around their site. We tried to see if they were using something like Cold Fusion or ASP or somesuch thing. Dupree observed that all their pages had the file extension of .pyra on them, and so surmised they had developed their own proprietary server-side scripting language. This impressed the hell out of us, and to this day I've held them in high respect for having done such a thing.

Then the other shoe dropped.

So, as I mentioned, yesterday I was poking around on Google to find out why my site was broken. I was looking for a specific error message, so that's what I searched for. Lo and behold, there were search results from .pyra pages on Blogger's site with ASP error messages! I did further checking and found that, yes, .pyra pages are simply renamed .asp pages!

So there you have it, Pyra. The cat is out of the bag. I still admire and respect you guys to no end for creating such a killer app for personal web sites, but that magical aurora around .pyra pages has faded.